No Laughing Matter

Well, this seems to be the day for British madness in the news. I found this gem right after putting up the last post on rewarding bad behavior in school with iPods. We're warning our British readers - and we actually have a few - that you must not engage in any humor whatsoever. Gags are right out. Unless you want a visit from the cops.

Colin and Jenny Harrow were visited under suspicion of cruelty to animals after sending a spoof letter to their local paper.

The Cumberland News had published an article claiming that incomers from the South were releasing grey squirrels in the area - which prides itself on being one of the last bastions of the red squirrel population.

The Harrows, who used to live in Devon, sensed an anti-southern bias in the story and decided on a light-hearted response.

Mrs Harrow, 59, wrote: "We would like to inform any interested parties that we (formerly southerners) have just returned to our cottage with a crate full of wild grey squirrels from Epping Forest which we would be happy to supply to any other "outcomers", homesick for the South and in need of the odd grey squirrel to make them feel at home."

Shortly afterwards, there was a knock at the door of the couple's home in the Lake District village of Thackthwaite, near Penrith.

Two officers from Cumbria Police informed them they were investigating claims of squirrel abuse. They had come to check whether hapless rodents were being kept in crates after several complaints from members of the public……

….Mr Harrow, 64, said: "It would be laughable if it were not so sad. How do these people think we got hold of the grey squirrels in the first place - run around with a pocketful of peanuts and a lasso?

Actually, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard always use the peanut and lasso technique whenever we perform a squirrel roundup. How else are we supposed to crate them up to ship them to England? Oh sure, we tried all the new-fangled techniques like the squirrel catapult, the rodent Taser and the titanium 3-iron, but the old methods just work better*. Oh, excuse us a moment, won't you? There are a couple of Bobbies at the door.

(*No squirrels were lassoed, launched, Tasered, chipped, putted or harmed in any way during the writing of this post. Unless they died laughing at the British police. Which is likely.)

iPods: Not Just For Michigan School kids anymore!

I honestly, really, did not believe anyone could reach an even greater depth in foolish thinking than the Michigan Democrats who decided the right way to address a huge - and growing - budget deficit was to buy every school kid in the state an iPod. Really,I thought that was about bottom. I should not have underestimated the tunneling ability of British bureaucrats. Because they are busy heading right for the center of the earth. They plan to reward behavior in British classrooms with free iPods! Not just any behavior, either!

They plan on rewarding bad behavior with a free gift!

School tearaways are to be offered mountain bikes and iPods in return for good behaviour.

In a government campaign against soaring indiscipline, teachers are being told to reward disruptive pupils with prizes and privileges.

Badly-behaved youngsters must be praised five times as often as they are punished or criticised under guidelines unveiled by Education Secretary Alan Johnson.

They can be offered prizes and privileges ranging from non-uniform days and extended breaktimes to CDs, cinema tickets, personal music players and state-of-the-art bicycles.

The scheme has been branded 'absurd'. Ministers were accused of 'going soft' on discipline and critics said the guidance would encourage pupils to expect prizes for good behaviour that should be considered the norm.

This is idiocy on steroids. Do they have even the most remote clue what hell they are about to unleash on the schools? Silly question, obviously they don't. Pity the British teachers right about now. They are about to be overwhelmed with bad behaving school kids looking for the next free gift.

Germany Brings Back The Draft - With A Vengeance

The German military is getting recruits the old fashioned way - they are drafting them. And so it was that a lad named Lucio was sent a notice and told to present himself for duty in 10 days. Which is good, considering that will allow him to gain about 35% more age.

Lucio, the lucky draftee, is currently four weeks old.

A spokesman for the army said the notice had been sent erroneously because a clerk typed in the wrong date of birth for the boy from Aubstadt, in southern Germany.

"It was an accident," an army spokesman told Reuters. "Somebody entered the wrong number into a computer. There was no harm done. We realised the error the same day and called up the family to tell them to throw the notice away when it arrived."

Are the new recruits expected to crawl in formation? Or just snap to attention when filling their diaper? Inquiring minds really want to know. On second thought, no we don't.

Going Batty

Scientists from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel are, unfortunately, cooperating with the Animal Uprising™. They are working to sober up the bats.

Bats often risk getting drunk off cocktails of alcohol that stew inside ripened fruit. And just as driving is dangerous for intoxicated humans, so is flying for boozy bats.

Now scientists find bats are savvy enough to dine on certain types of fruit sugar to help them get over the ill effects of alcohol. These findings could shed light on how wildlife deals with alcohol.

Bats make up one-quarter of all mammal species. Almost one-third of all bats live on the juices of fruits and the nectar of flowers.

Fruits such as figs and dates accumulate ethanol, or drinking alcohol, as they ripen. While Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus) prefer such fruits when they are ripe, as little as a 1 percent concentration of ethanol is toxic for the bats. Even concentrations of less than 1 percent ethanol can make fruit bats sluggish against predators or hamper their ability to avoid obstacles. (For comparison, pale lager beers that most consumers are familiar with are typically 5 percent alcohol by volume.)…….

….Breath tests revealed that alcohol levels dropped faster after feeding on fructose-loaded meals than when given food containing either sucrose or glucose. They also found that as the amount of booze in food increased, the fruit bats preferred fructose-rich food more than glucose-laden food.

So the researchers are rescuing bats from the bat equivalent of skid row by feeding them sugar. And they have a bat Breathalyzer, too. (Did they get that off the shelf or did they invent that, too? What's it called? The Bat Breath 2000?) They're running a Betty Ford for bats there! Look, it's not our place to judge what drove the bats to drink in the first place. Maybe it was a bad home life, maybe it's genetic. But we'd prefer not to have even more sober bats flying about - they're more apt to get into trouble working for the animal overlords. The drunk ones just hit walls and fall down. Which suits us just fine.

Rootkit Killer

Here's some good news. Grisoft, makers of AVG Anti-Virus, have released a free rootkit killer program. It will dig through your computer's files and operating system and kill malicious rootkits if they are found. One review I just read said that it works pretty well, too. (It either missed one particular rootkit used by the reviewer to test it or the rootkit reinstalled itself right after it was removed. The author wasn't sure which had happened.)

Millburn, N.J. - April 10, 2007 – GRISOFT, the developer of AVG Internet security software, today introduced a new, free product aimed at detection and removal of Rootkits. Rootkits are a specific malware type which hide in other applications or a computer‘s operating system kernel. This allows malicious applications to then collect passwords and sensitive data from the infected computer without user knowledge for personal information theft, spam relay and other criminal intents.

Rootkits have become a severe threat in comparison to traditional malware because conventional antivirus often misses the hidden rootkit. They execute by embedding applications within the operating system, which is also an essential application to many necessary programs including antivirus protection, so it is important to correctly distinguish between malicious rootkits and legitimately hidden processes. GRISOFT conducted six months of open beta program testing to ensure AVG Anti-Rootkit is able to protect users and operating systems without the confusion and hassle of false alarms.

The download is available from Grisoft's website (This page). I'm sure it will be mirrored at a lot of other download sites by day's end.

No Honor Among Cartoon Characters

We regret to inform our readers that Rocky the Flying Squirrel has offed Bullwinkle and stolen his gig. No, really. Over in England a rapping squirrel will now be performing a recitation of "Daffodils", the poem written by William Wordsworth some 200 years ago. Bullwinkle did a version of the poem in his poetry corner way back in the early '60s.

A rapping squirrel has been enlisted to make William Wordsworth's most famous poem exciting to teenagers. Cumbria tourist chiefs, who have released the extraordinary version of I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud, also hope it will bring tourists to the area.

It marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of the poem Daffodils.

The version, which includes some variation on Wordsworth's original words, is accompanied by a pop video shot on the banks of Lake Ullswater. It was while he was passing Ullswater on a stormy day that Wordsworth saw a "host of golden daffodils" which inspired the work.

In the pictures accompanying the article, it is evident that the years have not been kind to Rocky. He looks like he's put on a lot of weight. (The rap is over their for you to listen to as well.)

Could You Hum A Few Bars?

Thats exactly what music lovers at the Two Moors Festival in Devon may have to do this year. The new concert grand piano they spent years raising funds to buy was delivered yesterday. Perhaps if the movers had slowed the truck down a bit before dropping it off, it would have survived the delivery….

A £45,000 concert grand piano has been wrecked after delivery men dropped it 14 feet off the back of a lorry.

Music lovers had spent two years raising the cash to buy the nine-foot-long Bosendorfer for the Two Moors Festival in Devon.

Organiser Penny Adie, aged 54, had gone to London to try out different pianos before finally selecting the magnificent Bosendorfer, known as the Rolls Royce of pianos.

Disaster struck when a firm of specialist movers arrived with the piano at their gallery and arts centre at Barkham, near South Molton.

Penny was hoping to capture a triumphal arrival on camera but instead snapped the moment when the piano caught on the side of the lorry and topples off the tail lift.

The scene was reminiscent of the hilarious PG tips advert where feckless chimps try to deliver a grand piano.

It doesn't look like anyone is laughing in the pictures, though.

Making Mistakes

I generally don't personally watch debates between presidential candidates at every opportunity. I catch a few during the later stages of the actual campaigns, but seldom during the early primary process. There is only so much time and I already spend far too much following politics. But the debates are vitally important to the candidates. It is an opportunity for them to get their messages out to less committed political junkies who do not follow the news every day. So they have their place in the process. So it is actually somewhat amusing to watch the left go crazy over debates that have been arranged to air on Fox News. The Opinion Journal takes note of the latest batch of Democratic hopefuls who have bowed to pressure from the left and pulled out of a debate organized by the Congressional Black Caucus to air on Fox.

In the battle for control of the Democratic Party, the George Soros-MoveOn.org crowd is used to getting its way. So it's revealing to watch the consternation in those precincts to the Congressional Black Caucus decision to co-sponsor a pair of Presidential primary debates this year with Fox News.

Liberal activists are livid, to say the least, with one anti-Fox pressure group condemning the Black Caucus for "dancing with the devil." Color of Change, a coalition of black online activists, says the collaboration promulgates "bigoted, hate-filled worldviews." Markos Moulitsas, the DailyKos front man, calls the CBC "corrupt and compromised" for "doing Fox's bidding." His implication is that Black Caucus Members have somehow been bought off, though there is no evidence to support the slur. This is to say nothing of some of the more vicious blog chatter, much of it carrying racial connotations.

All of this induced Howard Dean's Democratic National Committee to announce last week that it won't "sanction" the CBC debates. John Edwards also repeated his profiles-in-courage act by announcing that he won't participate in the CBC-Fox debate. This follows last month's pander when he, the Nevada Democratic Party and Nevada Senator Harry Reid knelt before MoveOn.org demands that another scheduled primary debate co-hosted by Fox be called off. And yesterday Barack Obama bowed to the mob by declaring he also won't attend; so much for the Senator's promise to change the tenor of our politics.

What's funny here is that this debate is an opportunity to showcase the candidates to a larger potential pool of viewers and to give them a chance to gain support. But Obama and Edwards, so far, have bowed to pressure from the left and pulled out. Frankly, it doesn't speak well for the leadership potential of either of them. If they are this easily cowed by a small but loud group, why in the world should they be elected? So now they will only be seen by the faithful and not have a chance to sell themselves and their message to a wider audience.